Plan Nine!

"Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are giving you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimonies of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places, my friend we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty, let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space?" Criswell, Plan Nine from Outer Space (1957)

I just rewatched Plan Nine from Outer Space (1957, 59?) for the umpteenth millionth time in my ever-shortening life, and it went by like a fart in a high wind. (Or maybe a flying hubcap on a fishing line.) Do I need to say a lot more here? Outer space graverobbers in ridiculous costumes mouth nonsensical dialog while trying to decide if the planet should be destroyed because we're too close to inventing the "Solaranite". Or maybe they're saying "Solarbenite." I can't really tell, and the Lieutenant or whatever at the end of the movie slurs the words comically and says, "There's no such thing, you big fibber!" (Actually, he didn't call Dudley "Eros" Manlove a "big fibber." I just made that part up.)

Flying hubcaps or toys or whatever on fishing lines accost the cockpits (made of shower curtains and balsawood) of airline pilots who can barely mouth their dialog about Albuquerque before saying "Holy mackerel! Batman, that's nothing from this world!" (Actually, I added the part about him saying Batman. He didn't really.)

Bela Lugosi (who, as Bauhaus has so righteously observed, is and was, even then, dead) is at a funeral, and then wanders out of his Californian suburban dump house, and then we hear the squeal of some tires and a scream. He walks through a phony grave yard out of a stand of trees and raises The Cape repeatedly, in the same few scenes that shit auteur Ed Wood filmed before the old man went to that great big actor's home in the sky. (Maybe in the form of a bat.)

Mona McKinnon and Gregory Walcott play Paula and Jeff. Jeff is the pilot who saw the "flying saucer [...] but I can't say a word. I'm muzzled by Army brass. I can't even admit I saw the thing!" before a strange light passes over their back patio and knocks them all to the ground. Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson is Inspector Daniel Clay, rasps unintelligibly, and then emerges (with a helluva lot of difficulty) from a grave where someone is holding a high-powered flashlight under his face. (Which, I have to admit, actually does look rather good with his bald head and white, Marilyn Manson circa 1997 eyes.) The dirt from the grave "falls into the grave," defying the laws of physics.

There's a helluva lot of stock footage of those same hubcaps on fishing lines flying secret UFO missions over Hollywood, and even the Pentagon, and the Army shooting at them. Two Army guys stand in a field ("Looks like we've beat them off again sir," says one, without realizing the ironic humor implicit in such a statement), and the shadow of another can be seen on the wall behind, even though we all in the audience know they are standing in a field, looking up at the sky with binoculars.

Tor Johnson and Maila "Vampira" Nurmi wander around a "graveyard" with cardboard headstones. Vampira has a pencil-slim waist, huge arching eyebrows, and amazing Lee Press-on nails, and can kill gravediggers at a yard. (The gravediggers then become straw-stuffed dummies, but that's okay because "Maybe we're gettin' old.")

Jeff (Gregory Walcott) and the Lieutenants of both police and military variety, wander around the graveyard and come into the ship with Eros (Dudley Manlove). John "Bunny" Breckenridge, a transsexual who never actually completed his sex change, is the leader of the galaxy or whatever in a giant floating space station that looks like a heavy metal tit with a pineapple ring around it (which I guess is supposed to look like Saturn, but I think Kubrick and Lucas' legacy is still safe).

"What plan will you follow now?"

"Plan Nine."

[Looks at the sheaf of stapled-together script pages]

"Ah yes, Plan Nine. Plan Nine deals with the resurrection of the dead, long-distance electrodes shot into the pineal and pituitary glands of recent dead."

So comments the leader of the galaxy, who sits in front of a bunch of old junk electronics for obscure reasons. (Stuff looks like it was thrown out the back door of an old Radio Shack at the now boarded-up site of a city strip mall.)

So they're going to, get this, bring the dead back to life to convince the living that creating a "Solarbenite" bomb is a bad idea, and if we still ignore them, they're going to either overrun us with dead (ala' a George Romero flick), or maybe nuke us Klaatu-style so that our world (in the words of Klaatu), will be reduced to a "burned-out cinder." Note: That "burned-out cinder line comes from The Day the Earth Stood Still, a movie a little wonky, but still light years away from being an abortion like Plan Nine from Outer Space.

Later Doctor of Chiropractic Medicine Tom Mason joins us as a stand-in for Bela Lugosi, even though he is a foot taller; but this is okay, because he covers his face with The Cape, and so is now a complete look-alike. (At least in the director's admittedly soused way of thinking.)

Tombstones of cardboard get knocked over. Day equals night, which changes back into day...the movie can't distinguish the two. Dialog is inane, sounding as if it was pasted together by a drunken Dadaist poet who just hit a tremendous amount of Tijuana Loco Weed. Tor Johnson and Tom Mason get zapped and turned into high school science lab anatomical skeletons, AND, "All you of Earth are idiots!" (or so says Eros). Actor Lyle Talbot occasionally mouths lines and then looks embarrassed or confused about what he has just said.

Where was I? The film was famously financed by a Baptist church, who reputedly lost their holy backsides on the whole deal, but did, in coming up with the title "Plan Nine" (which they took to be less offensive than "Graverobbers from Outer Space") manage to provide a name for the indie record label of Satanic rocker Glenn Danzig's first occult and horror themed bands, Misfits and Samhain.

Not much else to say. Underground artist Joe Coleman (who has made a career for decades by painting graphically realistic, ghetto-style graffiti portraits of infamous killers and macabre characters) claims Plan Nine as a MAJOR factor in influencing his particular artistic interests, saying it was the particular way in which day and night became confused around the presence of the "Three Ghouls" that psychologically disturbed him as a wee tot.

Jeff (actor Gregory Walcott, who went on to bigger, better things) said of Ed Wood and his film, "The thing looked as if it was shot in a kitchen [...] Dingy, third-rung production [...] I liked Ed Wood but I could discern no talent there."

Anyone interested in knowing the ins and outs and ups and downs (mostly downs) of Ed Wood's rather unique, exceptional life, or just wants to take a look back at the era of really bad movies with guys in rubber monster suits, is advised to pick up a copy of Rudolph Grey's excellent book Nightmare of Ecstacy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Junior, published by Feral House around the Good Year 1990. It inspired Tim Burton's lovingly unrealistic biopic Ed Wood (1994) starring that star of stage, screen, and domestic abuse, Johnny Depp. It chronicles, through a collection of interviews, the fall and fall (there was no "rise" period here) of an alcoholic transvestite who wrote, produced, directed, starred in, and generally fucked-up a handful (or string, as it were) of bad monster and JD films, exploitation go-go movies, Westerns and other celluloid detritus of our bygone past. And all that before settling into a routine of beating his wife, directing porn, writing cheap, dirty paperbacks, and dying of a massive heart attack while broke and technically homeless, at the age of 54.

As for Plan Nine, despite what the Medved Brothers claim in their book, The Golden Turkey Awards, it is NOT the worst movie ever made. That distinction should more rightly go to either Bloodsucking Freaks, Mother's Day, I Spit on Your Grave or a myriad of films with the name "Gene Hackman" in the credits.

Keep watching the skies. (Those flying hubcaps are a motherf-cker.)

Plan Nine from Outer Space (1957)